 |
|||
 |
Empty
|
 |
 |
 |
|||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
The Tin Drum
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
Our DVD Price: £15.99 RRP: 
Availability In Stock - should be despatched within 24 hours. This product will be dispatched from Guernsey. Delivery times
Earn 75 Bonus Points when you buy this product. More info |
VHS £15.99
Film Description
A powerful adaptation of Gunter Grass's epic novel. The narrator of the film is little Oscar, a precocious child of a permissive petit-bourgeois couple. He decides to stop growing on his third birthday, the same year that Hitler came to power, as a protest against the sordid sexuality of his surroundings and the unstoppable growth of Nazism. With his noisy tin drum always at his side and a piercing scream that can shatter glass, Oscar makes his disturbing and darkly comic way through Hitler's Germany.
Film Information
| Director | Volker Schlondorff | ||||
| Starring | Mario Adorf, David Bennent, Angela Winkler
|
||||
| Genre | World Cinema
|
||||
| Country | Germany / France | Language | GERMAN | Year | 1979 |
DVD Extras
Restored print; Interview with Volker Schlondorff; Picture gallery.
Technical Details
| Certificate | 15 | Length | 142 mins | Label | NOUVE | ||
| Cat No | NPD1017 | Format | DVD | Colour | |||
| Region | 2 | Aspect | Anamorphic Widescreen | ||||
| Subtitles | English. | ||||||
4 Stills
 |
 |
Share your thoughts and opinions - write a review
Review by Peter Wild on 6th November 2003
Set against the backdrop of the Nazi rise to power and recounting the story of young Oskar Matzerath - the little boy with the ear-piercing scream and the penchant for rat-a-tat-tapping red and white tin drums, the little boy who decided to stop growing at the age of three - Volker Schlondorff's admittedly uneven adaptation of Nobel Prize winning novelist Gunter Grass' most famous work The Tin Drum is as eerily unsettling as Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend and as grotesquely comic as Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen.
The movie reverberates with images both mildly odd and downright strange - the close-up of young Oskar's screaming face as he shatters a teacher's spectacles, a doctor's embryo jar and all of the windows in the house in which his mother commits adultery; the drumming which turns a fierce Nazi demonstration into Last Night at the Proms; the eels squirming about within a dead donkey's head yanked from the ocean (and the ensuing domestic in which Oskar's mother plonks violently upon the family piano and hoarsely shrieks German folk music drowning out Oskar's father's attempts to get her to eat).
But that is not to say Schlondorff gets everything right: the movie is both too literal and too oblique. Portions of the novel are served up virtually verbatim whilst other sections (the last third of the book) are overlooked in favour of that which is grotesque, that which is outlandish and that which is strange. Minor niggles aside, however, the movie is a genuine oddity (an oddity made odder still given the plaudits it received - Best Foreign Film Oscar 1979, Best Film at Cannes) worth watching for its central performance alone - the wide eyed, hollow cheeked magnificence that is David Bennent.
View more reviews by Peter Wild
Review by Howard Schumann on 10th October 2003
The Tin Drum by Volker Schlondorff is the story of Oskar Matzerath, a boy who grows up in Eastern Germany prior to and during World War II. Oskar decides the only way to protest being part of the adult world is by banging on his drum and remaining a child forever. The drum is his rebuttal of society and his protest against the mentality of his family and neighborhood (or perhaps against all passive people in Nazi Germany at that time). Based on Gunter Grass's highly acclaimed novel that captured the madness of war, the film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign film in 1980, and the Palm d’Or at Cannes.
Oskar can scream with such a high pitch that he can shatter any piece of glass. He even controls his scream to the point where he can break windows on the other side of the city, or etch writing into glass. Oskar uses his ability to manipulate and control the adult world, often using vicious and cynical snide comments about the insanity around him. At one point, he disrupts a Nazi rally by changing the beat of his tin drum to the Blue Danube which the band then follows. The ensuing scene where the crowd breaks into a dance and the rain comes down leaving the Nazi soldiers bewildered is one of the best in the film. Oskar tries to shock the world out of its inhumanity. His life reflects Germany's struggle to free itself from its own dream of Teutonic superiority and find peace in the national soul. It is an absorbing and thought provoking film.
View more reviews by Howard Schumann
Hand-picked recommendations of related films
|
The Lost Honour Of Katharina Blum Dir: Volker Schlondorff A shy young woman sleeps with a man, unaware that he is a terrorist. Then the police burst in and a nightmare be... More > |
|
Dir: Edgar Reitz Shot over two years, the first part in the trilogy of Edgar Reitz's TV masterpiece Heimat (Homeland) is a stagge... More > |
|
Dir: Werner Herzog A collection of five uniquely strange and inimitable films from the enigmatic director who has constantly stretc... More > |
This film is part of the following Film Collections
Best Foreign Language Film Oscar Winners
Including: All About My Mother, Amarcord, Babettes Feast, Belle Epoque, Cinema Paradiso, Closely Observed Trains, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Dersu Uzala, Fanny and Alexander, Fellinis 8 1/2.
Including: All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now Redux, Blow-up, Brief Encounter (Lean, 1945), Dancer in The Dark, Elephant, Kagemusha, La Dolce Vita, Marty, MASH.
This film is part of the following Customer Film Lists
Growing Pains by Bob Easom
A selection of 10 (8 available) less renowned but memorable films about growing up and the way accident of birth or events shape the protagonists destiny. The non-available (yet?) films are 'The Ice Palace' by Per Blom and 'Alpine Fire' by Fredi Murer.
Movie Weekness by Idris Babur
Reliving a year full of inspired film watching.
Oscars Winners - Great films, up to 70% off by MovieMail
This year, MovieMail has decided to dispense with the standard list of award-winners, and lift the curtain on some of the lesser-known categories in which many rare and exciting films reside.
The following movies were singled out for important aspects of the film-making craft and, we think, are the titles which glister brightest in Uncle Oscar's auric eye.
War and Children by Abhijeet Ranadive
Films that depict children being shaped by war.
Recommendations from fellow customers
by Jean Renoir
More films directed by Volker Schlondorff
More films starring Mario Adorf
What Have They Done To Your Daughters?
More films starring Angela Winkler
| Special Offers | ||||||||||||||||
|
More Great Offers
|
| BestSellers | ||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
| Recommended by MovieMail | ||||||||||
|
A curated collection of the best DVDs
Latest Additions
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
| Just Released |
|
Beaufort The Boss of It All Be Kind Rewind The Cement Garden Bill Douglas Trilogy |
| Coming Soon |
|
Map of the Human Heart Roberta Water Lilies Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont You, the Living |
|
||
| Home | Film Catalogue | New Releases | Special Offers | Top 30 | ||
|
||
| Film Collections | Film Media | News | Your Account | Help | Become a MovieMail affiliate | ||
|
||
For questions or assistance, call us on (+44) 0844 776 0900 or email on enquiries@moviemail-online.co.uk © 2004-2007 MovieMail, Ltd., All Rights Reserved. Find out more about MovieMail |
||
|
Seven Samurai
La Regle du Jeu
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Night And Fog
Breathless (Godard, 1959)
